Earlier in the year, Digg introduced the Digg Bar and Digg Short URLs. These shortened URLs directed users to the Digg landing page, only if they were logged in to Digg.
However, recently some changes seem to have been made in this arrangement, whereby, the links are directed to Digg, instead of going to the publisher site, even if the users are not signed in on Digg.
As a result, thousands of users are pushing traffic to Digg, instead of to the original site that they wanted to link to, without even being aware of it.
Initially those who experienced this change wondered if this was an intentional change, or an error on the part of Digg. It has now been confirmed, via an email from Digg Support to Mashable, that this is an intentional change, and is “working as planned”.
This change will also be applicable to Digg URL’s that were created previously.
Digg has made these changes without informing their users. As a result, thousands of Digg users have no knowledge of the fact that they are diverting their followers to Digg instead of the intended site, which seems quite unethical, and is very likely to upset the publishers who happen to be Digg’s main source of content and traffic.
Digg founder, Kevin Rose has pleaded ignorance of these changes as he was on vacation for two weeks, and he says he will look into the matter.
